By BRIAN SEIBERT

June 20, 2014

Robert Battle, the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, is fond of flattering his audience. During his preshow speech at the David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, he encouraged the spectators to applaud themselves. “Look at you!” he said, before humorously noting the usefulness of the phrase and how it can be directed at people who aren’t actually looking that good.

For years, critics of the Ailey troupe have relied upon a version of “Look at you!,” praising gorgeous dancers and star-quality performances in less than stellar choreography. In the three years since Mr. Battle took over and started revamping the repertory, there has been much less call for that kind of compliment, but Thursday’s program was a “Look at you!” kind of show.

The new production on the program, “Polish Pieces” by the Dutch choreographer Hans van Manen, wasn’t actually new to the company. It was acquired by Mr. Battle’s predecessor, Judith Jamison, in 1996, when its mix of austere geometry and histrionic sexiness must have seemed a daring addition — so European! — to the usual Ailey fare.

There are moments in the work that suggest why Ms. Jamison chose it: odd points at which Mr. van Manen appears to be drawing upon African-American body language and even on Ailey choreography; the combination of twisty hips and jerky, weather vane arms; the duet of desperation in which the woman grinds her backside onto the man’s and grabs at his crotch.

The dancers wear unitards in primary colors, and each time these speed skaters accumulate, they’re striking. The long-limbed Antonio Douthit-Boyd, in yellow, doesn’t need the screaming choreography to look impressive. He and his colleagues attack the dance with force, but the piece, set to mostly melodramatic music by the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki, looks even more dated in the context of Mr. Battle’s recent additions. It’s as unsubtle as the costumes.

The program opened with Aszure Barton’s “Lift,” a commission from last year that stands as one of Mr. Battle’s least fruitful choices. Like “Polish Pieces,” it has an arresting surface: bare-chested men and women in bird-feather skirts emerging from darkness to slap thighs and lurch, as if some god were beating the stage like a drum.

But the imaginative poverty of a tribal piece for this troupe is compounded by failed attempts at idiosyncrasy. For all the stamping and hopping by dancers, “Lift” just doesn’t live up to its title. That’s not something you can say about David Parsons’s “Caught” (1982), which uses strobe lights to make a dancer seem to hover. On Thursday, Kirven Douthit-Boyd made the trick work perfectly.